On the nightstand beside my bed is a photo of me on a fishing trip to Canada when I was still in my twenties. Kylee placed it there for me; she said she wanted me to have it there to remember what I looked like with long hair, and to not feel lonely when I go to bed at night without them here with me. Never mind that the place is loaded with pictures of the girls and me. She picked this one, maybe out of some understanding of someone else in the photo with me.
The photo is of me and two other men, sitting on a log on the shoreline of a small island of some Canadian lake. It's funny: when I look at it I can still conjure up the feelings, the smells, the temperature, all the details of that particular moment when the picture was taken. At the time it was just another moment. But it's indelibly impressed.
The man seated right beside me on that log is Don Horne. Don was the owner of the company I was working for at the time, and my friend and mentor. In the photo, he is already in his sixties, which is as I always picture him (because I never knew him until he was that age and never saw him age any more than that). Don was cut from a different kind of stone than most of us. He was raised on a North Dakota farm during some of our country's most difficult economic times, one of three sons. He left the farm after high school to join the Navy, then went on to college after that, and then worked a series of jobs before ending up as a salesman for a large chemical company.
It was during that time that Don literally created the industry of railroad contractors that applied herbicides along the tracks to keep vegetation off the railroad beds and back from road crossings for safety. Four other companies sprang up in the wake of Don's endeavor, but Don was the eternal godfather of the industry. He was respected far and wide. He had a calm, quiet demeanor that bordered on stoic, and combined with his physical stature, it was easy for him to command respect. But he never demanded it. He just earned it from you.
Don became a father figure for me at a time when I most needed it. I had left school to work for his company full-time when neither school nor anything else was really working for me. I worked for him for an entire year before I even met him, but shortly after I did meet him at a company gathering, word came down from his office in Minneapolis that I was to be invited into a management role. I was all of 19 at the time. I was also joining the ranks of a management team of four that, aside from me, was all above the age of 65. I was flattered, and eager to please.
These were heady days. I was doing a great deal of growing up at the time, and while I was I was traveling the country and experiencing things that were a great deal different than my life had seen up to that point. The whole world seemed to be opening up to me, and I am not sure now that I was properly prepared to choose between all of the options that I faced or that presented themselves to me. At times, I chose poorly.
But in my effort to do what I thought would earn Don's respect and appreciation, I somehow made more good choices than bad. My career flourished as a result, the satisfaction of that fed on itself, and I worked that much harder. An even greater reward: Don and I grew close. He became my first and best mentor and friend. Whenever I would travel north to the Minneapolis office, he always insisted that I stay at his home with him and his wife Bea. Bea would spoil me with home cooked meals, which you learned to treasure when you traveled nine months out of the year. Don would always take me out fishing on the lake or to dinner at his country club. In the evenings we would relax and enjoy the view of the lake from his living room or back deck and talk, or not talk, for hours.
Everyone in the company used to kid both Don and me about some of the most ridiculous reasons Don would find to make me travel to Minneapolis. In the spring, there was always some 15 minute sales call we would make on the division VPs of the Burlington Northern, followed by an afternoon spent putting Don’s dock out into the water. When it was time for the annual meetings—which were really just those chemical company-sponsored fishing trips to Canada—Don would have me come up a week early for pre-meeting preparations. Those preparations usually involved some project that needed done around the property. In the fall we would spend about an hour in the office one morning going over bids that would be due for the next season before spending the next two days putting the lawn and landscape to bed for the winter.
Those fishing trips called company meetings were golden. I always felt like the kid invited to the castle on those things. All you had to do was show up, because the chemical company sponsor covered every single expense, including guides and all new gear to use. While there, I got one-on-one time fishing with Don for hours and days. Sometimes it was enough just sitting there with lines in the water, listening to nothing but the water lapping the side of the rented, aluminum 16-footer. Other times we actually talked shop, and I remember sitting there in that boat, feeling like young Grasshopper, while Don shared with me his business acumen and leadership skills honed sharp from his decades of experience.
After about ten years of bliss in working with Don, I started having serious thoughts about where I was going with my life and what I could do with his company. Don was signaling that he was growing a little weary of the travel and the effort it took from him personally to keep it all going. He didn’t seem to trust any of the older managers to take the reins, based on his conversations with me. I began to develop big dreams about succeeding Don one day, running his company for him, but in the back of my mind I knew there was no way someone my age would be given that. I wanted it, but I also knew I wasn’t really ready for it, and knew that my enthusiasm would never overcome all the inherent obstacles there would be for someone my age to run it. It was an industry and company heavy laden with gray beards. I could never fully win over their trust, despite whatever backing Don gave me.
Don must have understood it as well, because we never discussed it. He got an offer to sell the company to a larger company and took it. I stayed with the new company because Don ushered me in to them as his rising star, and I had a great relationship with the new president, but it was not quite the same.
Our group, though, did not mesh well with the larger organization, and so when it began to fail, Don bought it back and started rebuilding it again. It took an enormous effort on his part, and I jumped in to work with him with everything I had. He just inspired you to do whatever it took.
When the company was back on its feet again, Don started looking for another buyer. I had another series of “I could do this!” thoughts which quickly subsided, and began to think about moving on again once Don was gone. I still felt a little like I was betraying Don. The whole reason he bought the company back and rebuilt it was because he loved the people who were about to lose jobs after years of dedication to him. But like any good father, Don knew when it was time to let me go. We talked about it a little one night. I would stay to help another owner get a start, and then I would move on to other ventures.
A new owner did come along that next winter. I stayed one more season to help with the transition, as did Don, but I considered that last year on the road my swan song. I hit every old haunt I could on the road that year, and along the way I looked up every friend I had made throughout the years of travel. I enjoyed that year of travel more than I had since many more before it, and at points had thoughts about how much I was going to miss it. But in the fall I came across another opportunity and took it. I called Don to tell him. He had also ended his relationship with the company just weeks before, but I still felt like I was deserting the House That Don Built. It was one of the hardest conversations I had ever had with someone. But, Don understood completely, and he made me promise that it was not the end of our relationship.
The last day I worked on the railroad, one of the most romantic industries I think there is in the country, was nearly picture perfect. I took a crew heading out of Kansas City on one of the special jobs treating brush along side the tracks, a job done only at the end of the year and staffed with only the most senior road vets. Some of these guys and I were together my entire career there, some of them growing up and older just like me, while traveling the country. At the end of the day, our train, and our work, ended at my old hometown of Mosby, and at about a hundred yards from the house my dad had inherited from my grandparents. I climbed down off the train, walked off the tracks, and got in my dad’s truck so that he could drive me back to town. I’m not sure I can put any words down here to describe that feeling—something like pride, relief, and anticipation all at the same time--that I felt at that moment.
Over the years after that Don and I still talked frequently. I would call him whenever I was considering any type of a career move, and he always had sage advice I valued. I also never grew tired of hearing Bea tell me whenever she answered the phone how it was good to hear from their “adopted son.” It was never easy to get up to Minneapolis to see them in my new job, but I got to do so now and then. And during one of the difficult years the girls and I made it up there, and Don and Bea got to see the family I was raising. It was another moment of pride.
A couple of years ago, I got a letter in the mail from Bea. Bea was writing to tell me that Don had died suddenly from a heart attack at church one morning, and that she was writing me to tell me because the phone number she had for me was disconnected. I’d forgotten to call them; I had dropped my land line and changed cell phones during the process of Michelle and I separating. I felt horrible, because the man I loved and respected for 26 years, a man that I think helped raise me, helped make me who I am today, was gone, and I wasn’t even there to pay my respects because of a stupid oversight and lack of thought on my part. Even worse: I couldn’t be there for Bea in her time of need.
Despite that ending, I know that Don knew, and knows, what he meant to me and my life. He invested in me when maybe others would not have. He recognized something that no one else took the time to, even though I was not making it very easy for anyone to see in me at that time. He carefully and patiently guided me during my career at his side and for many years after. He was the greatest mentor I ever had in my life, and I still think of him often.
I’ve tried, in my career and otherwise, to find opportunities where I can pay respect to Don by being a mentor to someone. I don’t know that I can ever be the sort of leader and mentor he was, but trying to do so means a great deal to me. Becoming someone’s mentor is not something you just do; it is a relationship that grows based on trust and respect, and so it’s more something that you feel invited into by someone more than you solicit. But I have had the honor of fulfilling that role for a person or two, and every time I do, I try to remember the way Don guided and directed me and use it as my example, because I remember how much it meant to me and worked for me. And then maybe, just maybe, if I do it right, someone I mentor will one day want to do the same.
Originally published 1/23/10.
© 2010 Cody Kilgore. All Rights Reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention. May not be copied or distributed without prior written permission.
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